The Abyss Stares Back

An Inconvenient Truth

6

APR/15

The battle starts with two half – transformed man monsters charging across the chamber at us. Abalescu is in the lead, with another roadwarden right behind. Fight!

We are victorious! We knock Abalescu unconscious with the sedative from the torture room, kill his lieutenant, and have to deal with a few of the now-awakened man-things from the gurneys. After the fight, I take one of the dead gurneymen into the operating room to see how the creature attached to their necks is controlling them, and Milosh puts Abalescu into one of the empty cells to deal with him later.

Detail: each of the villagers had a creature attached to their faces (like a face-hugger) that has a tentacle shoved down their throat. Their eyes are white and devoid of thought. This explains why the villages working on the wall outside are wearing scarves.

Milosh and Mads interview one of the other people in the cells, who were part of the road wardens involved in an attack (and victims of an ambush) on Kreszk after the bread incident. It seems that point hope has probably been attacked, although the men don’t know for sure. We also take time to arm and feed the men in case they can serve as backup in the upcoming fight, leaving the cell door unlocked behind us.

I perform an autopsy on the dead gurneymen, and see that the face-hugger has infiltrated the men’s spinal column with control cords and injection tubes. It doesn’t look like they can be forcibly removed without harm to the victim. However, the knowledge gained from the examination, combined with information on the notes in the room, gives me the impression that I could use some sort of sonic attack/command word to detach the creatures. It would work better if I dissected the living man, though… We’ll leave that for later.

Milosh and Mads continue on down the hallway and come to a room with a couch and some other furniture, and some supplies that may be used in the torture room. Also here are the pendants that we wore in the asylum. Weird… And even weirder is what happens when Milosh grabs his – he sees a vision of our experience in the asylum, but then it shifts and the asylum suddenly appears in much better repair. And it makes it look like we broke into a legitimate hospital and killed innocent people. The other pendants, grabbed by Mads and I have similar effects. So… We killed orderlies? And Sebastian? Or is this another lie?

The door at the end of the room suddenly opens, and in walks a woman, dressed in a labcoat and flanked by two assistants. We immediately recognize her as the receptionist from the asylum – the one who provided us with the pendants that are sitting in this very room, and which tricked us into killing an unknown number of patients, doctors and orderlies. In a heartbeat, Mads has slammed the door closed behind her to prevent her escape, and Milosh has backhanded an assistant to the ground and has her throat in his grip.

We have a short, tense conversation with her. Infuriatingly, she’s under the impression that we’re part of her team, like most of the awakened. To make things worse, she super proud of tricking us into killing at the asylum, and getting to torture (and maybe turn) Sebastian for her cause. We get so angry that Milosh just tries to outright murder her, which in hindsight could also be part of her plan… So we fight!

She turns out to be pretty tough for a scientist secretary, and is a brutal disciplinarian who makes Mads and Milosh attempt to kill each other before she destroys their minds. It’s rough, but we survive.

Now we’re left with the decision as to whether or not to dismember her, or flay her, or something equally horrible. Oh Mads, you monster…